Highly visible science: a look at three decades of research from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Spain

Résumé 0

"Since the international visibility of scientific research is especiallyimportant for developing countries, the multidisciplinaryjournals Nature and Science were analyzed for the papers publishedfrom 1973 to 2005 by Latin America´s three most productivecountries, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, and these comparedwith those from Spain. The total numbers of publications were:Spain, 696; Brazil, 411; Mexico, 227; and Argentina, 127. BothSpain and Brazil published over 65% of the total papers in Nature,in contrast to Mexico and Argentina where production wasmore evenly distributed between the two titles. An increasing presence of all countries over the 33 year span was found, more sofor Spain and from 1993 onwards. A high level of internationalcoauthorship was similar in all cases (72-75%). The most visibleinstitutions in the Latin American countries were the large nationaluniversities. From 12-18% of publications remained uncitedwhile three on the genome received more than 2000 citations.Analysis of the most highly cited journals indicated a concentrationof publications in physics, astronomy and astrophysics, geosciencesand molecular biology, findings which were reflected inthe results of a text mining analysis of abstracts."